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EXCLUSIVE: DreamWorks has made a preemptive deal for an untitled pitch that will be written by Jonathan Tropper as a potential directing vehicle for Real Steel helmer Shawn Levy. Part of the deal is rights to a December 10 article in The New York Times about the last lab that had the chemicals to process Kodachrome in the final days before Kodak retired the photo development system and conceded to digital cameras. The plan is to shape that event–Kodachrome fans ventured to the Kansas lab from all over the country–into a father-son road trip story to reach the lab and process photos before those still photo images are forever lost.
The film will be produced by 21 Laps’ Levy and Dan Levine and Gotham Group’s Ellen Goldsmith-Vein and Eric Robinson. Gotham brought the project to 21 Laps and they worked out the pitch together. Tropper most recently adapted the Steve Martin novel The Pleasure of My Company for Levy and 20th Century Fox. Tropper is back with DreamWorks after scripting the film adaptation of the Mary Chase play Harvey that had a Steven Spielberg directing commitment several years ago for a co-production between Fox and DreamWorks. That film fell apart over casting. Tropper adapted his own novel, This Is Where I Leave You, for Warner Bros, and several of his other novels are percolating all over town. DreamWorks co-presidents Holly Bario and Mark Sourian made the deal. The deal for the NYT rights was brokered by ICM. Tropper’s repped by UTA.
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the pictures would be lost forever, or until they ran across a professional photographer who had his own dark room.
No, this isn’t true. Kodak isn’t making the chemicals any longer, and no one else is either.
To be fair, they could have them processed as black and white pretty easily. But yeah, post-Dwayne’s, there’s really no way to get color from Kodachrome.
LOVE Jonathan Tropper’s writing. and this movie sounds fantastic!
isn’t Levy first-look at Fox? did they pass?
eric robinson is a great producer. best of luck on the movie.
Hi, Eric.
Sorry to disappoint snarkers, but Eric is awesome. And neither this, nor the other post, is Eric. Grow up.
Thanks, Mrs. Robinson.
This proves that any article ever published in the New York Times can become a movie even if the article has no real movie potential. If it was published in the NYT then it has intellectual credibility to it.
To be shot on digital
Genius ! Very, very funny.
Not if Spielberg directs it.
Little Miss Kodachrome.
If they could find a movie in Facebook, and 127 Hours, they can find a movie in this.
It’s just a chemical. If Kodak stops manufacturing it, I’m sure another savvy & enterprising supplier will fill the void. Between their demand for celluloid & their chemical manufacturing acumen, the Indian system alone could sustain cinema as we used to know it.
Well, first off, Kodak already stopped manufacturing it. A year ago. The deadline for getting your Kodachrome in was because Dwayne’s had received one last batch from Kodak before they shut down the production line.
Secondly, it’s a whole series of chemicals. Proprietary ones, which nobody has replicated. But sure, it would presumably be possible for someone to replicate them…if there were any left to study. Which there isn’t.
Third, you then have to deal with the fact that the K14 process is *very* complicated, and involves things like controlled reexposure at specific wavelengths of light, and requires honest-to-God chemists to run the machine (unlike the more common C41 process, which can be done by any reasonably well-behaved monkey working at a corner drugstore). It’s not something you can do by hand; it pretty much needs a custom-designed Kodachrome processing machine.
There was one Kodachrome development machine left in the world, and Dwayne’s sold it for scrap after the last batch of chemicals ran dry.
Thank you for this post, as I was reading the last post I was getting very angry at the blasé manner in which the general population was taking the news. Folks, that’s it. There is no more Kodachrome. It’s the end of an era. For those of us who have loved this vibrant transparency film it is a hard passing, as nothing is quite like it. It’s what I cut my teeth on as a young photographer. It was the last straw for me as a traditional photographer. I am finely moving into digital.
In the 1980’s I worked at a mom and pop photo processing shop in Newton, Kansas. I worked hand developing black and white film and hand printing photographs. We sent all our k14 to Dwayne’s. Nothing is impossible, however, I’m not real hopeful that even a group of knowledgeable darkroom savvy photographers can reproduce the film or the chemical or the mechanisms to revive this process. If anyone knows of such a group, please post immediately before I blow a huge amount of money on a digital camera that will be obsolete in two years.
“Quick, Jennifer, get me Paul Simon on the phone, NOW!”
That wouldn’t be an entirely terrible thing. It’s a great song and could be an interesting story.
“When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school . . . it’s a wonder I can think at all.”
I’m betting right now that Paul Simon’s “Kodachrome” will be used in the trailer, before probably being used a few times in the movie.
I’m a fan of obvious things, such as wet water and white clouds.
ugh.
Next on Hollywood’s agenda – a father-son road trip as they travel from town to town to track down the elusive McRib sandwich.
I’d watch it.
I lament Kodachome’s sad pass. I’m now trying to save Cibachrome and The Last Lab doing it on the Left Coast, The Lab Ciba in Burbank, where your Kodachome slides can still be placed into
the enlarger- old school – to make the most beautiful prints on the planet.
Just to correct comment # 1: the whole deal with Kodachrome was a proprietary development process. It could not be done at home. In Europe, Asia, and South America, one paid for the development as price of the film and sent it to Kodak for processing. In the US one did this too until the early 50s when an antitrust decision forced Kodak to allow others to have the chemicals and learn the process. But it was a VERY complicated process with three exactly repeated steps to process the reds, greens, and blues, etc. And special machinery. So the last lab to do it had people sending film from all over the world. It was a fabulous story known to many in the photography (film photography) community before the Times did it. I was considering a magazine piece myself (I’m a writer).
Thank you Vince P. It is a fabulous story. How many chemical processes have a song written about it by an iconic songwriter? Think about it people. -Christina Rodriguez
A film about the end of film? Well, at least it should be better than some crappy F/X tentpole built around another Hasbro toy.
a nuanced, intimate journey from the director of… Just Married. I’m not being fair, Levy also directed the delicate, character-driven… Date Night. My bad. I forgot the inspired and original…Pink Panther. I give up. Crap away on another one, Shawn.
Just to let everyone know, the last town/place to develop kodachrome was Dywane’s Photo in Parsons, Kansas…my hometown. It was a really big deal in our small southeast Kansas town.
Yes,and it was a big deal to the photographic community at large Joanie.
Christina Rodriguez-
Wichita, Kansas
Paul Simon? Father / son issues? A road trip? You know who’d be great to write this? Alexis C. Jolly.
This story is already filled with too many holes. The film can even now easily be taken to a color lab for development. OR to WalMart where they still offer the processing. WalMart sends the film off to the nearest professional color lab, as well. There have been and still are other chemical processing plants in the US whom make and provide the necessary chemicals for any professional photographer with a dark room to process this film.
The story reads as if its almost life or death to reach Kodak in time, but its only hype to generate interest for a situation which is simply fiction. There wasn’t a dad and son or whatever, but the pair have been created to somehow form a story. It’s nice, but a far stretch on both counts from the truth.
Victoria, did you not read the other posts regarding the Kodachrome process? It’s a slide film unlike any other. You’re missing a few eggs in the basket you’re delivering here.
Go back and read before you post you Post.
Every other fifth poster here will point out that Walmart can do Kodachrome.
Most people don’t know squat about Kodachrome, and they don’t care one bit about film photography. I guess those script writers will not have too difficult a job to convince the audience of whatever story line they invent.
Cool, maybe I can play my own role since I had a decent sized one in real life: http://kodachromeproject.com/blog/
After all, I did shoot the very last frames of the stuff…
I think that’s a great idea! Maybe I can have a roll too. After all we really lived this stuff.
Walmart took the film in, but it ended up at Dwayne’s Photo for processing. There is also an article in the NYT on the front pape of the December 30, 2010 issue about Kodachrome and Dwayne’s Photo as well as many other various articles. Most of which you can find on the internet by searching Kodachrome.
God, I hope this shoots on RedCam…
Maybe they can take in a few winery tastings along the way.